One more Ambedkar Jayanti. This time, following his invocation in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, with greater competition over capturing his legacy. The commencement of air services from Maharaja Agrasen Airport, Hisar. A marathon in Lucknow. A membership drive by one party. A “Swabhimaan Samman Samaroh” by another. “What a remarkable reversal of fortune history has delivered” notes rapper and scholar Sumit Samos in these pages (April 14, ‘A memory and a promise’).
This carries a serious danger. With the completion of his iconisation, Ambedkar’s memory could face the same fate as that of Gandhi post-Independence: He could be reduced to an empty signifier, a lifafa that anyone can use to insert anything. This casts a responsibility on those who connected with Babasaheb’s mission before he became respectable to the rulers. They must recover the radical in Ambedkar so that his legacy cannot be pocketed, so that he continues to remain difficult to assimilate, just as he was in his life.
This audacious project was begun by Suraj Yengde and Anand Teltumbde in a remarkable collection of articles by scholars across the globe, The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections. The introduction notes the problem with much of the scholarship on Ambedkar: “One finds Ambedkar eulogised for the wrong reasons: As a messiah of the Untouchables, a Constitution maker, a Bodhisattva, a neoliberal free-market protagonist, a monetarist; he is also vilified unjustly as a casteist, as a British stooge and a communist hater”. But the book was limited by the fact of it being a pioneering effort and also by its tendency to understand “radical” in a conventional left or communist sense of the term.
Another valuable rethinking was initiated by a seminal essay, ‘Self purification vs self-respect: On the roots of the Dalit movement’ by D R Nagraj (Flaming Feet and Other Essays), in which he offered a fresh reading of how Gandhi and Ambedkar transformed each other. That strand was developed politically by Devanur Mahadeva and in academic writings by Nishikant Kolge (Gandhi Against Caste). But its political implications are yet to be worked out. This cannot be left to the burgeoning academic industry of Ambedkar studies. Just like Gandhian studies of yesteryear, some honourable exceptions apart, scholasticism tends to bypass the real and big issues. Recovering the radical in Ambedkar is not an academic project. This is among the most pressing intellectual and political projects of our time. It is intertwined with the mission of reclaiming our constitutional democracy, indeed of saving our endangered republic.
A good starting point for this would be to shift our focus from an exclusive attention to Ambedkar’s critique of the caste order to his legacy as a theorist of democracy. As Scott Stroud has argued (The Evolution of Pragmatism in India), Ambedkar’s thinking on democracy was deeply influenced by his teacher John Dewey’s ideas on democracy as a way of life. At the same time, he modified any theory or ideas he received through a view from below. In many ways, he was the first and perhaps only democratic theorist of 20th-century India. For most other Indian political thinkers of his time, democracy was a necessary byproduct or a bonus of their principal ideological project of securing national independence or establishing socialism. While thinkers like Jayaprakash Narayan and M N Roy offered detailed critiques of representative democracy based on party politics, for Ambedkar, democracy was at the heart of his thinking. He thought through the tricky issue of political design of representative democracy, of the political and social consequences of different kinds of institutional designs.
Ambedkar radicalised the liberal idea of democracy by making a transition from a formal to a substantive definition of it. For him, the point of the legal constitutional mechanisms was “to bring about welfare of the people”. He offered a novel definition of democracy: “A form and a method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and social life of the people are brought about without bloodshed”. (‘Conditions precedent for the successful working of democracy’, 1952). This sets him apart from his contemporaries, in India and the West. Unlike Dewey, his version of democracy is not just “social democracy”. He anticipated a radical republicanist theory of democracy.
Ambedkar’s justification of democracy did not rest only on the liberal idea of liberty. For him, the foundational idea of democracy was fraternity, a precondition for the realisation of both liberty and equality. Ambedkar offered a deeper argument for universal adult franchise, including for those who were illiterate, than was available in his times. And his pleas that Dalits could not be represented by caste Hindus anticipated the recent feminist arguments for “politics of presence”.
Ambedkar reminded us that “democracy is not a plant that grows everywhere”. For him, the first and foremost condition of democracy was that every citizen should enjoy equal treatment in everyday administration and governance, that there is popular acceptance of constitutional morality and the upholding of moral order in society. There is no democracy without the existence of, and respect for, opposition: The tyranny of the majority is antithetical to democracy.
Such a reading would rescue his legacy from the reductions he is subjected to, even when being lauded. He is reduced to his own social location, as a Dalit, when he should be seen as a voice of social justice and of every social group that suffered injustice, within and outside India. For him, caste injustice was an intimate prism through which he thought through a wide range of issues of our time.
In contemporary polemics, he is reduced to partisan disputes of his time vis-a-vis the Congress-led national movement and the British colonial state. We can discover a radical Ambedkar by recovering the principles that informed these disputes and by reapplying those principles in the contemporary political context. Ambedkar was a thinker ahead of his time, while much of the politics carried out in his name is behind its own time. What we need is Ambedkarism 2.0.
The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal
